The original page on this site has been replaced by a full website devoted to the Grand Quintiles of 2004. Please click here for the new website. This new site is designed to give you the full picture on the events of October 2004 and presents extensive research undertaken by Jill Whitman and Ed Gillam into the phenomenon of Grand Quintiles from 0-2500 CE.
The following text represents the main part of an email exchange between Ed Gillam, based in Exeter, and Jill Whitman, based in Toronto, Canada. In the exchange, Jill outlines her discovery of a pair of perfect grand quintiles that will form during the latter part of 2004. I have edited her text for readability but I have endeavoured to keep Jill's enthusiasm for her discovery.
Jill was prompted to email me after she read an article of mine in the Mountain Astrologer (Feb/Mar 2003) entitled "The Septile and the Seventh Harmonic: Terror, Taboo and Transformation". She requested general advice about finding out more about harmonic charts and the so-called 'minor aspects'. To aid identification of Jill's text this is included in maroon colour.
It seems to me that the serious exploration of the minor aspects is indicative of the broadening of human consciousness reflected by the current cycles of the outer planets. I would like to be part of this exploration as time passes. I have a particular interest in quintiles and I am always disappointed on how little literature there seems to be on the subject.
Pretty soon after this initial email, Jill wrote back with news of her discovery.
I am writing you now on a different matter, one that - assuming you don't already know about it - I'm sure will interest you. I've been even more sure of this since I found your name on the website about the grand sextile coming later this year.
Jill is referring here to my interest in the Harmonic Concordance, a Grand Sextile pattern occurring at the lunar eclipse of 8-9 November 2003. You can find out more about this at Johnny Mirehiel's site.
If you'd like to give it out to the rest of the people involved in that I'd be delighted. I'm a bit out of my depth here - and frankly I'm more of a novelist than an astrologer - so I've decided it's time to give this away to you professional astrologers so I can get back to my own work. I'd be grateful for any feedback you can give me.
Below is the text of a message I sent out tonight to a few places including ISAR, CURA, Kepler College and the CPA. I'm testing the waters to see if it's as intriguing as I think it is. I sent it to Alan Oken first and he was very encouraging.
Here it is: "As far as I can discover, no one else has noticed that on October 1, 2004 there are going to be five planets - Sun, Saturn, Moon, Uranus, Pluto - linked together in quintile aspect to form a 360 degree circle in the sky. An almost perfect Pentacle. I call this a Grand Quintile since that, surely, is its name, but I can find no reference in any literature to the existence of such a phenomenon. Maybe I've simply never come across it but I thought I should check with those in the know.
It occurred to me that it would be interesting - as above, so below - to speculate on the most potent time and place on earth for this magical configuration. Since the Moon is involved, the pentacle's existence obviously depends on it. With that in mind I calculated the exact midpoint of Saturn and Uranus for October 1, 2004 and came up with a Moon at 14 degrees and 48 minutes of Taurus, 13:24 UT. Then, for lack of a better idea I sought out where on the planet the Moon would be ascending at that moment. The answer: Lhasa, Tibet, with the Moon on the Ascendant at precisely 14.48 of Taurus, 21:24 local time.
I don't know what, if anything, to make of that but I can find no other location - striking or otherwise - in political geography with the Moon on the AC or MC at that time.
My next idea was to try to find previous grand quintiles and see what happened in world history around those dates. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the software to conduct such a search efficiently so I'm hoping someone else might be interested in doing so. Because my computer is such a derelict I can't even load Winstar any more so I've been counting manually (72+72) with the aid of Astrodienst, zooming in on periods of a couple of hundred years and hoping for the best. I have carefully left Chiron and the asteroids and sensitive points like the ascendant and the nodes of the Moon out of the equation - no cheating! Also I have adhered religiously to a 3 degree orb (in the current 2004 instance nothing is wider than 1 degree 43).
So far I have come up with one grand quintile in 571 BC and another in 473 BC and no others. Although I can't claim to have exhausted the possibilities, I have delved into large sections of the past 2,500 years and if my primitive efforts are any indication, this occurrence is very rare. I have not yet looked far into the future. What would be really amazing would be to find one that didn't include the Moon - one that lasted a day or two. I'd lay money on that reflecting clearly observable events.
If I am correct in assuming that this isn't a well-known phenomenon, it may be because the discovery of the outer planets is still fairly recent. What are the odds of a configuration like this being noticed without Uranus, Neptune and Pluto slowly moving in and out of orb with each other to form points of the star, especially before computer programs were around to help us? For all I know, there hasn't been one to notice since 1781. If anyone finds any others all I ask is to be kept in the loop.
I'm working on the assumption that there must be more to this than art for art's sake. Whether or not it will manifest in any specific external events remains to be seen. Alan Oken calls the quintile an aspect of "evolutionary potential". What will it signify for such an aspect to dominate the heavens, even if only for a few hours? Let's hope it's part of a general raising of consciousness signaled by the current transits of the outer planets. Less than a month to go to the mutual reception of Uranus and Neptune. With my Sun at 0 degrees Pisces I can hardly wait.
I hope this is of some interest. I wanted to be sure that this beautiful pattern has a chance to circulate through our collective astrological consciousness before the date of its appearance. Do with it what you will!
Jill had captured my imagination with this find. You can see from the chart that the five-pointed star pattern is stunning. I have not read much analysis of the interpretation of the grand quintile so I was intrigued to know what Jill had found out. A search of the internet found very little information on this astrological pattern. Jill continued in a further email:
I feel compelled to get this message out to as many as people as possible in case its implications are something we need to address as astrologers. As absurd as it may sound, this came about through a meditation on a six-pointed star I was doing about a year ago. The six-pointed star kept turning into a five-pointed star. It started appearing in my mind like a laser image at the oddest times until fnally I couldn't take any more and set out to find a pentacle in the outer world.
What never ceases to amaze me is that I found the current grand quintile with only a few hours of searching. The others were very hard to find and in fact I only found them on a flash of inspiration with regard to the research for the historical portion of my novel. We're speaking of the days of Pythagorus and the pre-Socratic philosophers like Thales, who it is said predicted the eclipse of 585 BC. The ascendancy of Athens was just beginning but it seems the Persians were the greatest power at this time. I hope to find something more recent and, obviously, better documented, to relate to modern times. Of course the specific planetary energies involved would be just as important as the aspect pattern itself. It's interesting that the grand quintile in 571 BC was also in the time of Libra within a few degrees, although the Sun does not figure as a point of that star.
Jill was continuing her research on a daily basis. But the next discovery lead to the realisation that grand quintiles were not perhaps as rare as she had originally thought. The search for the grand quintile was accelerated by a new computer with Solar Fire software. Jill was able to scan over time and see quintile aspects unfolding before her eyes.
As of yesterday evening I got access to a computer with Solar Fire and so, in default of any easier route, I have decided to conduct a search backwards in time from 2100 to the high Middle Ages. This is going to take me many hours but at least it is do-able with the program's automation feature. I can get through about 50 years in 3 hours so unless my eyes wander I should be able to nab all - or the vast majority - of them as they fly by on the screen.
I have already found 2 more of them in the second half of the 21st century so they are not as rare as I - and apparently everyone else - imagined. The astrologer who wrote the info on the website you sent me calls grand quintiles "so rare as to be practically non-existent". This is simply not true. We just never noticed them before. When I was first playing around to figure out how to go about this I found one at random on December 14, 1859. What's especially intriguing about that one is that it includes Uranus and Neptune, but not Pluto, so there is no reason why someone should not have noticed it at the time. Maybe they did and it's lost in some long dead astrological journal collecting dust on somebody's grandmother's shelves in Brighton or Pittsburg!
I'm looking for the one without the moon in it, if such a beast exists. Although the moon is embodiment, a longer-lasting grand quintile might have had a more demonstrable effect - who knows (apparently no one)! I have already discovered how easy it is to get four of the five points of the star by having the moon fill in the blank. Perhaps the missing arm would have an effect like the blank spot in a T-square, but then the configuration is so subtle...
I am coming to believe that subtlety is what it's all about. We are ready to work with septiles and quintiles now because human awareness is ready for them, as we discovered the outer planets when we were able to acknowledge their energy. Anyway, we can no longer say that I've only found three of them - I guess if you're ready to put it on your site before I'm finished you can just say it's a work in progress. At first I thought finding more of them diminished their significance but perhaps not. It's what it may or may not indicate that counts.
Jill emailed me on 21 February 2003 with the following news. Her email communicates the excitement of her discovery. Jill has found that the quintile of 2004 is actually a double phenomenon linked by the lunation cycle. In her research so far this seems to be a unique example.
This time I think I'm onto something very rare. As you know I've been scanning backwards in time from the end of 2099 using Solar Fire's automation feature. I haven't been able to spend much time on it yet but today I determined to at least make it back to the date of my original find, October 1, 2004. I have found grand quintiles in 2083, 2065, 2046, 2040, 2033 and 2024, all including the Moon (and two including Chiron, by the way, which I've decided to leave in for the sake of argument, although it ups the number per century dramatically).
Unless I missed one, there's a 20 year gap in grand quintiles from 2004 to 2024. I'm having Ursula check this for me in the next couple of days - two sets of eyes are better than one. Today with 15 minutes to spare before I had to leave for work I finally arrived at October, 2004. The moving chart came to October 28 and my heart nearly stopped. I was looking at another grand quintile - in the same month as the first one, one moon cycle later! This has to be seen to be believed. Put the data in for October 28, 2004, 10:17 p.m. London time and you'll see what I mean. It's been right there under my nose since November when I discovered the first one. The only reason I missed it was that at the time I had nothing to work on but Astrodienst and they use an orb of 2 degrees, which I accepted without question.
This leaves the Jupiter-Saturn link just slightly too wide to register, so I never knew the missing quintile was actually there. Since I had specified a 3 degree orb on Solar Fire it caught it right away. As you'll see, this pentacle is virtually the same as the one on October 1 except that the Sun has moved on to be replaced by Jupiter. The other four points of the star are all in the same signs within about a degree of their earlier placement. I chose the exact moment for the configuration as I did in the earlier case, by finding the midpoint of Saturn and Uranus. The Moon in this case falls at 15 degrees and 6 minutes of Taurus, as opposed to 14 degrees and 48 minutes of Taurus in the earlier one. October 1st is like a dress rehearsal, and there's more.
In the wee hours of the morning on the night before the October 28th grand quintile there's going to be a total lunar eclipse. (What was that about the November 8 grand sextile?) On Sunday I'm going to spend the entire day working my way backward through the 19th century looking for more. Since these aspect patterns occur every few years there is a good chance that an observable pattern of world events, or at least world "mood", may emerge around the dates I'm sure to find. Maybe we'll find well-known individuals born under grand quintiles.
Thank you for your comments on the aspect patterns. I too am no mathematician - anything but! - and I agree that it's reasonable to assume that the frequency of the pattern should decrease according to the number of planets involved. It does occur to me, however, that a grand sextile may not be less common than a grand quintile after all, for two reasons. First, with a 72 degree gap, Mercury (and almost certainly Venus) would not be in the running for the five-pointed star. The grand sextile is a little less constrained in that way.
Secondly, if I've understood all this properly, the subtler the aspect the smaller the orb one should use. A lot of astrologers go as wide as a 6 degree orb between sextiles but it's not uncommon to use as narrow an orb as 2 degrees for quintiles, and I believe it's even tighter for septiles, is it not? That cuts out more and more possibilities in moving to finer and finer divisions of the circle.
It is worth examining these grand quintile charts in a bi-wheel format. You will notice that four of the five points remain occupied by the same planets - the Moon has returned to the exact degree of the first grand quintile 28 days previously. The pattern is completed at the second grand quintile by the movement of Jupiter to the Sun's degree in the first chart.
There is a great beauty in this symbolism - Jupiter is known in astrology as a protective influence. In traditional astrology it was known as the Greater Benefic. In astronomy, Jupiter's position (and size and mass) in the solar system is known to protect the Earth from much danger from outer space. Witness the comet Shoemaker-Levy Nine's dramatic collision with Jupiter a number of year's ago.
It is too soon, perhaps, to venture an interpretation of these two beautiful celestial patterns. However, the words 'recovery of order' come to mind. It will be interesting to see if the month of October 2004 marks the resolution of some of the difficulties that face the world at the beginning of 2003.
If you would like to contact the main researcher, Jill Whitman, please email your comments.